On January 9th, I came down to morning coffee, opened my blog, Spoon Feast, to find a glaring announcement that the blog had been suspended.
Suspended for “violation of terms of use and advertising”.
The announcement read further: Sometimes we do make mistakes (Ya think!) so if you feel this was in error, use this form to contact us.
So I clicked it.
The form read; Report a blog for violation of terms of use, choose one of the below:
- This blog promotes hate speech;
- has mature content,
- supports advertising or multilevel marketing,
- promotes self hurt,
- is a violation of my trademark,
- is a violation of my copyright
Pick your poison.
None of the choices were for questioning suspension. And you couldn’t submit the form without choosing one of the options. How bogus is that!
In the meantime any visitors get diverted to the Freshly Pressed home page with a banner:
Spoonfeast is no longer available. It has been archived or suspended due to a violation of terms of use and advertising policy.
And I had no way of contacting my followers, or accessing any content. It was all gone and I was blocked from doing anything, posting, commenting, blocked and shut out of the blog totally.
Needless to say this caused quite a bit of stress.
I felt cut off from the world.
I felt I should have done an “In My Kitchen” post for January. (Sorry Celia, there were too many things going on and then Spoon Feast got suspended.)
Like a bad child from school only I had no idea what I had done. Really, did they object to kale salad that much?
I found a form to contact support, sent several e mails over the next couple of days.
No response.
I found an old e-mail from the WP support team where they actually responded to an issue a while back so I wrote them there. I wrote to support and help, being blocked from forums I couldn’t go ask there either.
Robert found the address and phone number of what we thought to be the corporate office for Word Press/Automatic (their parent company). I called and got this message:
“You have almost reached the cell phone for Matt Mullenweg, please leave a message.” So I did. Then I found his Facebook page and sent a message there too and sent him an e-mail.
If you don’t know who Matt Mullenweg is, and you are on word press, you should.
Next Robert sent a message to both support and help at word press asking why and to reinstate Spoon Feast.
My next plan of action was to publish both the help and support e-mail address on Facebook and ask everyone to write in to ask for Spoon Feast back.
Just as I was about to do that, I got a response! Yes an actual response saying the blog had been reviewed and the suspension had been lifted. “We are very sorry for any inconvenience.”
Seems like I used some words in my last post that triggered the automatic anti-spam regulators and they zapped me.
What words?
Raw was one.
Massage was another.
I’ll leave the third one out in case it triggers the automatic anti spam response again.
I think “kale” triggered it too.
Too much kale on the internet perhaps.
So in the meantime, thinking about how to recover or move my content that I don’t have access to, stinging from being told You don’t belong on Word press, thinking about how much time it took to get Spoon Feast to where it was. I felt like a deflated balloon.
One thing I realized is how much time I spend on writing, photographing, planning all that goes into Spoon feast. Suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands.
Time to work on lesson plans, the class I am taking, planning TV shows for this season, and working on my book. Imagine losing the blog and gaining more time for all these things. OK, I could keep busy.
But being suspended still makes me angry.
What can be done to protect our blog content? Anything?
Celia, I’ll do an IMK post if it isn’t too late. (Yes, I am superstitious)
Related articles
- Matt Mullengweg on the third age of WordPress (onemanandhisblog.com)
- In conversation with Matt Mullenweg, WordPress (johnhaydeninmd.com)
- Matt Mullenweg Owns The Internet: Every Fourth New Website Launched Uses WordPress (statspotting.com)
- Suspended? (rachaeleden67.wordpress.com)
Spoon Feast 
Almost too ridiculous to respond to, but I know how frustrated, hurt and angry you are. Daily, as a 72 year old I scream at the phone, the computer, the absolute idiocy of our world , no positive way to communicate without holding for a machine. I am glad I did not know then, but will click on all places and try to find a place to vent my own anger and the stupidity of it all. But…laugh at this, I totally dislike kale…spent two weeks in Hong Kong once, the only vegetable we saw was kale. We asked for vegis, we got kale.Might be ready to at least look at it for you, as a small token for all the stress of the past week.Thanks Robert, you always were a good guy!
Robert still is a good guy, he is my Hero!
Thanks Linda.
Great to hear from you!
Wow…I just saved this post. You never know when something like this could happen to anyone without reason. You have given us an idea of where to start if this happens to one of our blogs…thank you. I’m happy that it has all be straightened out.
Thank you Karen, I was afraid I had lost everything! Do you back up your posts?
I haven’t backed up my posts but what happened to you certainly give us all food for thought. My goodness…you are a food blogger. All they had to do was look at your previous posts. Happy that you got everything straightened out.
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Holy cow. Now I want to figure out how to back up my posts. Like Karen said, couldn’t they look to see who they were suspending or actually check out the post that triggered the suspension?
I would have been livid. So glad I self host so that this doesn’t happen to me. You can download your. Xml file on a regular basis to have a master copy of your blog 🙂
I was quite angry. Does self hosting make that much of a difference?
there is a huge difference but you need to decide whether it is worth the cost. If not, just do a weekly back up of your blog 🙂
Thanks! I’ll look into it.